The GenoCAD point-and-click user interface guides the user through the process of designing new sequences. By successively clicking on icons representing structural features or functional blocks, complex DNA sequences composed of dozens of functional blocks can be designed in a matter of minutes. Upon completion of the design process, the sequence can be downloaded for synthesis or further analysis.
The idea of computer aided design in synthetic biology is fascinating, intellectually interesting and important, and infuriating at the same time. As a biologist who works full time trying to build synthetic gene networks, the idea of being able to computationally design a system of genes in minutes that actually works is a beautiful dream. The problem is that right now it’s not coming up with ideas or designs that is the hard part, it’s actually getting the designed systems to work the way we think that they will in the cellular context. I wish this money was going into trying to understand some of the underlying biology—What constitutes a “part”? How do genes from different organisms work in your “chassis” strain? How can you regulate gene dynamics and cellular noise in a way that allows genetic networks to function predictably? I do hope that the community building aspect of the project does take off so that people can more easily share this kind of information with each other, because only through an enormous and concerted effort to collect this kind of data will we be able to understand genetic networks and be able to build new ones. At that point, software will only be icing on the cake.
